Sex and The City (Flores)

Introduction

Sex and the City characters (L-R) Miranda, Samantha, Carrie, and Charlotte

As the world’s technology continues to develop and advance, literature has also progressed to change with the times. The introduction of the Internet age allowed for communication across the globe, making the world smaller and easily accessible at a moment’s notice. People are able to connect in ways never seen before. The traditional perspectives in which author, reader, and text interact are redefined using the tools that we have. Web 2.0 sites make this possible, as users are able to interact collaborate together online. Readers are no longer limited to only viewing the content, but are now able to participate in the creation of text. In this way, readers become authors and the text is constantly being transformed. This allows for several different interpretations and representations of a text.

Online communities have emerged because of the Internet’s power and capability to connect all people. Communities where readers share information “are held together through the mutual production and reciprocal exchange of knowledge.” In a “wired world”, knowledge and opinions are pooled together in a kind of social culture found online. Texts can be loosely viewed as anything users read or experience, such as movies, television shows, and video games. The Internet allows for remediation, or the representation of one medium in another medium. Remediation is also when a text is presented in another form of mediation. Fans of a text may represent a text in their own original way. Another response to texts may be lifestyles that have formed, as texts can greatly influence a person’s feelings, thoughts and actions.

My final project examines the online communities formed around HBO’s hit TV series Sex and the City. Sex and the City, or SATC, follows four women as they tackle everyday life, love and relationships in New York City. With its first episode in 1998, SATC has since then become a part of today’s popular culture. Although the show ended in 2004, it is still survived by its huge web presence. First, I will analyze the ways in which both fans and haters alike participate in online communities praising, discussing, and bashing on the show. Then, I will discuss how fans have remediated SATC in their own ways through fan fiction and original songs they have written. Lastly, I will discuss the lifestyles that have developed around the life, lessons, relationships and fashion that the show brings.

Knowledge Communities and Haters

A picture from the Carrie/Big appreciation thread

SATC’s popularity has brought about many knowledge communities in which viewers of the show poolinformation or bring up various discussions. Wikia ,

Wikipedia and Fan Forum are just a few examples of fans pulling together their knowledge about the show to create informative sites for their audiences. The Sex and the City Wikia page has every fact you’d need to know about the show from episode guides to the novel that the show is based on. Completely user created, the site is a great place for anyone to learn everything they ever wanted to know about SATC. Fan Forum has many tribute pages, such as the "Carrie/Big appreciation thread #24 " in which fans collect pictures, quotes, facts, and just about anything related to a character or the relationships between characters. Although there are a few general discussion pages, the site is dominated by a lot of tribute, trivia, picture, and quote pages.

It is interesting to see discussions during the show's final season in 2004. Near the season’s end, eaton219 posts “Mr. Big really needs to come back and rescue Carrie. He needs to just show up at the last minute, after finding out that she is moving to Paris, and, without even saying a word, it needs to dawn on her that he is the one! Like all of a sudden she will float back down to earth and the light will come on. ‘Oh my gosh, what am I doing?!’” User liljeannee responds to eaton219: “New York is such an integral part of the show.. I know that the producers and directors would want the last scene to be in New York … I am guessing that the last scene will be the girls walking down a New York street as the camera pans away.” These people are revealing some type of spoiler, as users tell others in the community what they predict will happen using knowledge from past SATC episodes. They come together in this virtual “coffee room” and examine the show. I find it amusing that eaton219’s prediction of Carrie ending up with Big totally out of the blue is almost spot on and comes true in the show’s the last episodes.

From an "I Hate Sex and the City" facebook group

The Internet also facilitates discussion about Sex and the City through facebook groups and discussion threads, with haters claiming that women are portrayed as stupid, materialistic, and sluts. One such discussion thread is entitled Sex and the City Sucks. User rca215 writes “Sadly, every day more and more girls move here hoping to live the Sex & The City lifestyle.” Forsythia adds, “lifestyle that's completely unrealistic and vacuous...How the hell does a journalist earn enough money to rent a really nice apartment (as opposed to a shoe box) in that city and have a wardrobe full of designer crap??” Deny is the last to respond, ending the thread with “I turned it off before I started to hate women.” These haters do not seem to have much to support their claims, as they do not cite anything from the show, and may perhaps have only seen SATC advertisements. It is obvious that they have a strong dislike for the show and its representation of its main characters. Another thread, Does Anybody Else think Sex and the City encourages girls to be materialistic sluts, starts off with one user proposing “There's nothing noble or sophisticated about what they do. Aren't they just spoiled middle-aged sluts who only care about shoes and the cash?” These type of hater communities continually bash SATC, some without really experiencing even one episode of the show.

Alternatively, a different thread started on reddit has both fans and haters defending their points. sneakystratus says, “I thought it was absolute and utter trite, and I don't understand why people think it's a good thing at all. It just reinforces societal stereotypes.” Another user torreneastoria stated it “made me ashamed to be a woman due to the main characters vapidity. It seems ridiculous that these seemingly educated, upper middle class, middle-aged, self-supporting women would want to badger each other like high schoolers. In my opinion it was a poor example of how women really are.” Unlike the users from the previous thread, these haters have actually watched and experienced the show, not judging solely by commercials or quick glance. EveryoneElseIsWrong thinks “the best thing they did was to show women being overtly sexual and not feeling bad/slutty for it. they were confident women who slept around a lot, and that was just fine.” This fan defends several other fans’ claims that SATC portrays empowered and confident women, arguing against views of characters’ sexuality as being slutty. Here we begin to see disputes in the way the audience experiences and interprets the show.

Remediation

original HBO poster of the series

Using remediation, fans are able to interact with a story, taking it to new directions. Through fan fiction, fans are able to take take Sex and the City, a series which ended in 2004, and write new stories for other fans to enjoy. One user, Marie S. Zachary, has written many chapters and short stories. One story, “I’m so glad you came”, depicts the humorous friendship between Carrie and Miranda. Carrie is being sued by a man for a mishap that happened at a party when he misunderstood Carrie’s “I’m so glad you came” to mean something sexual. Miranda, a lawyer, talks to the man and gets him to drop the charges in exchange for a date. Zachary tries to reproduce the comedy and style of SATC by showing two women, best friends, who interact with comic relief. The author’s use of sexuality is a good attempt at reproduction, as most of SATC contains sexual situations either in scenes or casual meetings between characters. This fan may be an avid watcher of Sex and the City as she provides a provocative storyline enhanced by her understanding of the characters.

Another fan fiction story, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Women?” by Colin Bradshaw, sets Sex and the City in the world of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Carrie is portrayed as an android, and a man approaches her in a bar. He holds a gun to hear head and says, “Those aren’t your memories, they’re implants put there by the scriptwriters of Sex and the City to make you seem more human”. Writing for her column, she then questions, "what is it about us fictious Manhattan women that makes them [men] think we're a bunch of one dimensional, synthetic human beings?" At the end of the story, she is out with her girlfriends and keeps repeating herself, keels over and stops functioning. The author makes a statement about how the SATC girls can be robotic and fake. I think that whether he may be a fan or a hater, he portrayed the show well with Carrie in a bar and the way she wrote for her column. He incorporated how Carrie really ponders on the events that happen in her life, relating them and asking her readers what they think of it. She wrote about her day’s experience and posed a question, something that takes place in a typical episode. Here, Colin Bradshaw gives his own spin on Sex and the City. I also thought he combined SATC and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep well.

Song for Sex and the City Carrie & Mr.Big "Separate Umbrellas"

Vivien Wolsk writes, sings and plays the music for her original compositions, creating music for Sex and the City. Her song for Carrie and Mr. Big “Separate Umbrellas” has a cool jazz and blues type feel with a slow tempo. The lyrics “We led separate lives under separate umbrellas in the rain” are repeated as part of the chorus. In the show, the characters are always an on-again-off-again couple, so the song is about how Carrie and Big led separate lives but came together again in the end. The “separate lives” refers to different relationships that Carrie had throughout the series, and how she would always return to Big. The song is Wolsk’s way of expressing how it might feel to be in Carrie's shoes of her relationship with Big.

Sex and the City Sarah Jessica Parker Tribute- "New York Girl" Original song by Deedee O'Malley

"New York Girl" by Deedee O'Malley

“New York Girl” by Deedee O’Malley is an originally written song. It describes Carrie moving out of New York City and how much she will miss her home, friends, and city. She sings that although she is in LA she misses New York. The lyrics of the chorus repeated many times are “you can take the girl out of New York City, but you can’t take New York out of the girl.” This is a direct quote from SATC. Clearly, O’Malley writes this song for the SATC movie to show exactly how much she loves and appreciates the show. The songwriter gets deeply involved in the character of Carrie through the song, and she uses it to pay tribute to the series.

Another remediation of Sex and the City is Sex and the Valley , a YouTube video where fans try to make their own episode, applying SATC to the West Coast.

Lifestyle

As SATC portrays the lavish lifestyle of the single New York woman, most fans have adopted the show into their own lives through blogs. Blogger Simone Grant writes in the style of main character, sex and dating columnist Carrie Bradshaw, giving dating and relationship advice in her personal blog Sex, Lies and Dating in the City. Grant self-describes her blog as “Real stories about dating, relationships and sex in New York City. Truth is more interesting than fiction.” Some of the blog’s entries, like “The Worst Great Date Ever ” and "It's Not About Sex ", sound like they could be written by Carrie, but I wonder if Grant fabricates some situations in order to get more readers interested in her blog. Like Bradshaw, the author writes about her relationships in ways readers can relate. In “My Rules of Attraction ”, Grant poses also thought-provoking questions, but differences are seen through Grant’s crude language and the addition of a voting poll. In this way, the writer creates her blog so readers can respond and view other responses, a feature that Carrie’s newspaper column is unable to do.

Elli J, write of the "Sex and the City Lifestyle" blog

Elli J, writer of the Sex and the City lifestyle blog, gives readers advice on what valuable lessons they can learn from the show, using the series as her personal life’s guide. She sets rules: “Explore the central question posed by the narrative and theme of each episode. Weave all of this into my life as best I can.” Episode 18 – The Cheating Curve is one example of the blogger’s entries. She first enlightens readers on what happens in the episode and then explains how it can be incorporated into her own life. In this post, she recaps how the episode addresses “cheating on your friends” by lying to them or cheating on your significant other. She gives her own opinions of the topic, giving advice like “expectation is what let’s us down” and we should trust that things will go their own way, even if they happen unexpectedly. She ends this piece with “At some point it helps to loosen our grip and let the mystery of life unfold. Because it will anyway.” Elli J took SATC as a life model, expressing to her readers how they can also relate it into their own lives. I feel that in a way, she is answering the questions that Carrie poses in the show. She believes that learning from the show's experiences will help shape her own life for the better.

Samantha's outfits that inspired Kristina

Fashion is another big part of the SATC lifestyle and is brought to life by fans. College Fashion exhibits Kristina, a fan creating her own looks based on what Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda wore in the Sex and the City Movie. Kristina analyzes each character’s clothing, corresponding to their personalities as captured in the film. For example she copies the bright hues “full of sex appeal and figure-flattering” worn by the sexually promiscuous Samantha with clothing from Guess, Forever 21, and Target. She has put together items that women can find at any shopping mall, translating the style from the screen to reality. The fact that she has shared this on the internet makes it so that others can easily see what she has done and perhaps try to do the same.

Girlfriends Boutique of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

Girlfriends, an actual Sex and the City inspired accessory boutique in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, replicates the style of the series. Owner Karan Merkel “bring the latest in ‘Celebrity’ and ‘Sex in the City’ inspired jewelry, watches, handbags, perfume, belts, scarves, shoes, and elegant and rock star clothing to the Lehigh Valley area.” With private shopping parties and tanning, the store is marketed to fans of the lavish lifestyle depicted in SATC, regardless of whether or not they are fans of the show. Merkel recognizes that this type of fashion is popular and may continue to sell under this categorization because the SATC name brings in customers. Here, we see the series being embodied and used to merchandise.

Links and Resources

HBO Sex and the City Official Homepage

Sex and the City on IMDB

Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell

Sex and the City on TV.com